T OIBy
CATHY NEWMAN
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC STAFF
-
Photograph; by
MARTHA COOPER
NLY TWO WEEKS after moving to the
sunbaked brilliance of Tucson, Ari
zona, from the smog of Trenton, New
Jersey, Bill Flynn sat in a doctor's office
and ... twitch, sniffle, gasp ... a CHOO!
Welcome to sneeze city. Flynn learned he
could count on 21 pollens-from Arizona ash to Rus
sian thistle-to provoke the misery he thought he'd left
behind. For the next several years he faced regular
allergy shots.
Flynn, a large man with an easy laugh, whose hay fe
ver had marred his enjoyment of such simple outdoor
pleasures as a pick-up game of softball, was dismayed:
"Before I moved here, I thought: It's like Lourdes. I'll
walk off the plane and be cured. Don't believe it. There
are grass and trees out here."
And hedges, weeds, and other veritable pollen fac
tories, he might have added.
What happened to the healthy air? It was polluted by
allergy refugees and other newcomers who sowed the
seeds of their own discomfort by greening the desert.
As Flynn's allergist, Dr. Jacob Pinnas of the Univer
sity of Arizona Health Sciences Center, explained,
snowbirds addicted to their lawns had migrated here
and refused to transfer their affections to native plants
like creosote bush and cactus.
Instead, they had planted alien species-Bermuda
grass and elm trees among others-and hoisted the pol
len count to levels matching Milwaukee, Brooklyn, and
Pittsburgh-places they had fled.
"People who moved here didn't think about pollen,"
Dr. Pinnas said. "They just wanted a lawn and a tree."
When the statistics were in, they got a jolt. The al
lergy prevalence in Tucson, where nearly a third of
the population had moved for health-related reasons,
had jumped to three times the national average. The
allergy haven had become a Kleenex-littered hell.
If the mention of pollen brings tears to your eyes and
wheezes to your lungs, as it does to some 15 million hay
fever-stricken Americans, let me point out that there is
of flowering plants and conifers,
more here than meets the nose. Pollen means "dust" in
these minuscule grains-sacred
Latin, but brush aside that fact for now and view pollen
to the continuity of life-
as a living cloud, cast to the winds by trees and grasses,
launch the formation of a seed.
descending on the
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